1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to location detection systems and methods. More particularly, the present invention relates to characterizing and detecting a place where a client device is located.
2. Description of Related Art
Social location check-in has become increasingly popular these days. Applications, such as Google Buzz or Foursquare, allow mobile device users to automatically or optionally associate present locations with one or more specific places and to post check-in updates to one or more social networking service feeds, such as Twitter, Yelp, Google Buzz etc.
Thus, when a mobile device user comes into a given area, a typical location check-in application will, based on the present location detected by the GPS system and/or A-GPS (Assisted GPS) system on the device, present a list of nearby places and allow the user to check-in at one or more of the places. Users of these applications can add a place to the place/venue database associated with the location check-in services by specifying the location (typically in terms of street address) and the name of the place. If GPS is not available or if the location information is inaccurate, then such location check-in services may not function properly.